Why write?
[Revised & condensed from an old Idlepost.]
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” according to an ancient Greek soundbite. But the more I think of it, the less I can justify writing at all.
Somewhere out there in the electronic fog, I find podcasters saying roughly what I’d say. I read impossibly robust Catholic commentators who, because they are unreconstructed, advance something like my own party line. Why disturb the peace that U-boob, Facepaint, and Googlie would enforce, with their metastasizing censorship teams — hired inexpensively as the “legacy” media lays them off? The best one can hope, is to annoy them.
Their style, or more poignantly, their smell, is that of “mainstream” editors remembered from times past. It is many years since I discovered that the dullest newspaper reader is at least five times brighter than the sharpest newspaper editor. The most unrepresentatively sentient of these may be genuinely alarmed by a memorable remark, especially if it might be novel. He is powerfully irritated by writers who think, or use new information. Like a tardigrade, he is quite perpetual, and can survive even in interstellar space.
When I was but a lad of sixteen — among the last not to have been frontally lobotomized in a journalism school — I encountered an heroically obtuse copy-editor on the page-assembling horseshoe of the (then less contemptible) Globe & Mail. I put some copy in front of him that was dangerously funny. He diligently stroked through anything that made him laugh, with his blue pencil, leaving only the sludge unaltered.
Scottish, by the way. Probably a legal immigrant. The memory of his face still provokes me.
Sensing that I was his junior, he sent me to fetch him coffee. “That is not my job,” I explained, so he repeated his order in a louder voice, and a fuller brogue, and flipped me a fiver to pay for it. In those days, coffee could be had from the Globe cafeteria for a nickel. (Or for a dime in more fashionable quarters.)
There was a kindly but mischievous lady on cash, who had nickel rolls. I was able to obtain the change from her, in the form of 99 nickels.
Gordon, or whatever his name was, spontaneously ignited, when I spilt the nickels over his desk. He went promptly to the managing editor to demand that I be fired. But he learnt that he’d be reported to the union for demanding that I do what was not in my job description. And so he returned, forlornly, to his coffee, which had cooled.
Dark question. Why didn’t I get out of journalism, fifty-five years ago?